Pando

I recently wrote about our attempts to find a simple, cheap, and effective way to send very large files over the web. One solution I found, Jungle Disc, while amazing for personal use, is not ideal for sharing files. (It doesn’t yet support setting access permissions for individual users.) Yousendit.com, supports files up to 1GB for free, but whenever we tried to upload our 400MB media file the connection would drop before the upload was complete. We also registered for Strongspace because it supports SFTP, but we couldn’t get that to work either (they are still“looking into it”).

Finally, I found something that works: Pando. It is basically a modified bittorrent client designed to work between two individuals over e-mail (and via the servers at Pando). They encrypt your files, and hold the file on their servers for one week. You don’t need to register to download, but you do need to first install a small cross-platform client. It took about one hour to upload each 100MB, but it was steady and eventually finished the job without adversely affecting our other network activity. If you need to send something really big to just one person, this seems like the best solution for now.